Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?

I think if there was a plan behind this, the petty malice-via-recklessness would be better hidden. These news stories about pollution and lying, hacking AIs are pure liability for the "nascent superintelligence". If it exists, its control must be very tenuous indeed, hardly there at all.

I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.